[mythtv-users] WAF factor just plummetted, I need to make a strange rule.

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Thu Jan 29 21:31:36 UTC 2009


On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 09:21:11AM -0400, Mark J. Small wrote:
> 
> Hi everybody,
> 
> Last night my wife and I sat down to watch a movie that I had recorded 
> recently.  It was Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood version of Jane Austen.  
> It was on CBC (Canada eh!) at 1:00 AM sometime in the past few weeks.  
> 
> Well, the schedule information was not quite right and the recording stopped 
> after 2 hours.  So we missed the end of the movie.  Since this is the sort of 
> movie that is not likely to be carried at the corner store or the gas station 
> (our local DVD options), my wife was quite frustrated that we'll likely never 
> get to see the end of the movie.
> 
> So I need to set a strange recording rule to make sure that this doesn't 
> happen again.  Here is what I would like.
> 
> If I'm recording a movie
> 	If the channel goes off air after the movie
> 		Add an extra hour to the recording.
> 
> Is there any way to create such a rule?

I doubt you can do it automatically.   If you made your
requests in another system, like from perl code, you could do
it.

My personal taste would be something grander, however.  I think,
as long as there is disk space, and the tuner is availale (ie. there
is not another recording it has to switch to) mythtv should _always_
record extra on the program.  Except this "extra" should be put in
a different file, with these files of extra video purged first when
space is needed.

Now this is easy to do on linux with the truncate() system call.
It may be harder on some other OS, I don't know.

Users could go in and use "edit" mode to discard the extra space
right away.

I think missing the ends of movies is not just a WAF thing.
I think it's very frustrating even for the sophisticated user.

I would set defaults of:

    Movies:  10% of movie length
    Sports & Live events:  30 minutes
    General shows: 3-4 minutes -- you can effectively already do this
    Shows before off-the-air -- 20% of program length


This has really no downside, except that it will start truncating
away the space in autoexpire, so would will need to check the
recording relatively soon, and use Edit mode to apply a cutlist
if you want to preserve beyond the official ending.   (I would
code it so that if any cutlist is present, autoexpire would truncate
files from the last "delete after this" cutpoint.  This would apply
to any recording, not just ones with padding.)

I would also add more forward padding too, but in this case,
I would have the playing cursor start at the official start time,
and let me rewind into the padding, rather than have the program
start playing in the padding.

Another SMOP I probably won't get around to doing...




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